Gooey personal details alert! See also: Alicorn's Polyhacking.
Years ago, my first girlfriend (let's call her 'Alice') ran into her ex-boyfriend at a coffee shop. They traded anecdotes, felt connected, a spark of intimacy...
And then she left the coffee shop, quickly.
Later she explained: "You have my heart now, Luke."
I felt proud, but even Luke2005 also felt a twinge of "the universe is suboptimal," because Alice hadn't been able to engage that connection any further. The cultural scripts defining our relationship said that only one man owned her heart. But surely that wasn't optimal for producing utilons?
This is an account of some lessons in rationality that I learned during my journeys in romance.* I haven't been very rational in my relationships until recently, but in retrospect I learned a fair bit about rationality from the failures resulting from my irrationality in past relationships.
Early lessons included realizations like the one above — that I wasn't happy with the standard cultural scripts. I hadn't really noticed the cultural scripts up until that point. I was a victim of cached thoughts and a cached self.
Rationality Lesson: Until you explicitly notice the cached rules for what you're doing, you won't start thinking of them as something to be optimized. Ask yourself: Which parts of romance do you currently think of as subjects of optimization? What else should you be optimizing?
Gather data
At the time, I didn't know how to optimize. I decided I needed data. How did relationships work? How did women work? How did attraction work? The value of information was high, so I decided to become a social psychology nerd. I began to spend less time with Alice so I could spend more time studying.
This wasn't easy. She and I had connected in some pretty intimate ways, including a simultaneous deconversion from fundamentalist Christianity. But in the end my studies paid off. Moreover, my studies in personality and relationship styles helped me to realize that I (and therefore she) would have been miserable if I had decided to pursue marriage with her (or anyone at the time). Now that is valuable information to have!
Rationality Lesson: Respond to the value of information. Once you notice you might be running in the wrong direction, don't keep going that way just because you've got momentum. Stop a moment, and invest some energy in the thoughts or information you've now realized is valuable because it might change your policies, i.e., figuring out which direction to go.
Sanity-check yourself
Before long, Alice was always pushing me to spend more time with her, and I was always pushing to spend more time studying psychology. By then I knew I couldn't give her what she wanted: marriage.
So I broke up with Alice over a long conversation that included an hour-long primer on evolutionary psychology in which I explained how natural selection had built me to be attracted to certain features that she lacked. I thought she would appreciate this because she had previously expressed admiration for detailed honesty. Now I realize that there's hardly a more damaging way to break up with someone. She asked that I kindly never speak to her again, and I can't blame her.
This gives you some idea of just how incompetent I was, at the time. I had some idea of how incompetent I was, but not enough of one to avoid badly wounding somebody I loved.
Rationality Lesson: Know your fields of incompetence. If you suspect you may be incompetent, sanity-check yourself by asking others for advice, or by Googling. (E.g. "how to break up with your girlfriend nicely", or "how to not die on a motorcycle" or whatever.)
Study
During the next couple years, I spent no time in (what would have been) sub-par relationships, and instead invested that time optimizing for better relationships in the future. Which meant I was celibate.
Neither Intimate Relationships nor Handbook of Relationship Initiation existed at the time, but I still learned quite a bit from books like The Red Queen and The Moral Animal. I experienced a long series of 'Aha!' moments, like:
- "Aha! Body language and fashion matter because they communicate large packets of information about me at light speed, and are harder to fake than words."
- "Aha! Women want men to be better at making them laugh and feel good and get aroused and not be creeped out. They want men to be as purposefully skilled at flirting and social awareness as they are. Many a young woman is tired of running into men whom they could be attracted to except for the fact that he doesn't know how to have a fun conversation, doesn't know how to create arousal in her, and doesn't know how to lead her smoothly from flirting to great sex."
- "Aha! When women say "Be yourself," they mean "Don't be fake; be uniquely you." But they don't mean "Just keep acting and talking the awkward way you do now because you haven't learned the skills required to be the best man you can be."
Within a few months, I had more dating-relevant head knowledge than any guy I knew.
Lesson: Use scholarship. Especially if you can do it efficiently, scholarship is a quick and cheap way to gain a certain class of experience points.
Just try it / just test yourself
Scholarship was warm and comfy, so I stayed in scholar mode for too long. I hit diminishing returns in what books could teach me. Every book on dating skills told me to go talk to women, but I thought I needed a completed decision tree first: What if she does this? What if she says that? I won't know what to do if I don't have a plan! I should read 10 more books, so I know how to handle every contingency.
The dating books told me I would think that, but I told myself I was unusually analytical, and could actually benefit from completing the decision tree in advance of actually talking to women.
The dating books told me I would think that, too, and that it was just a rationalization. Really, I was just nervous about the blows my ego would receive from newbie mistakes.
Rationality Lesson: Be especially suspicious of rationalizations for not obeying the empiricist rules "try it and see what happens" or "test yourself to see what happens" or "get some concrete experience on the ground". Think of the cost of time happening as a result of rationalizing. Consider the opportunities you are missing if you don't just realize you're wrong right now and change course. How many months or years will your life be less awesome as a result? How many opportunities will you miss while you're still (kinda) young?
Use science, and maybe drugs
The dating books told me to swallow my fear and talk to women. I couldn't swallow my fear, so I tried swallowing brandy instead. That worked.
So I went out and talked to women, mostly at coffee shops or on the street. I learned all kinds of interesting details I hadn't learned in the books about what makes an interaction fun for most women:
- Keep up the emotional momentum. Don't stay in the same stage of the conversation (rapport, storytelling, self-disclosure, etc.) for very long.
- Almost every gesture or line is improved by adding a big smile.
- "Hi. I've gotta run, but I think you're cute so we should grab a coffee sometime" totally works — as long as the other person is already attracted because my body language, fashion, and other signals have been optimized.
After a while, I could talk to women even without the brandy. And a little after that, I had my first one-night stand, which was great because it was exactly what she and I wanted.
But as time passed I was surprised by how much I didn't enjoy casual flings. I didn't feel engaged when I didn't know and didn't have much in common with the girl in my bed. I had gone in thinking all I wanted was sex, but it turned out that I wanted connection to another person. (And sex.)
Rationality Lesson: Use empiricism and do-it-yourself science. Just try things. No, seriously.
Self-modify to succeed
By this time my misgivings about the idea of "owning" another's sexuality had led me to adopt a polyamorous mindset for myself. (I saw many other people apparently happy with monogamy, but it wasn't for me.) But if I was going to be polyamorous, I needed to deprogram my sexual jealousy, which sounded daunting. Sexual jealousy was hard-wired into me by evolution, right?
It turned out to be easier than I had predicted. Tactics that helped me destroy my capacity for sexual jealousy include:
- Whenever I noticed sexual jealousy in myself, I brought to mind my moral objections to the idea of owning another's sexuality.
- I thought in terms of sexual abundance, not sexual scarcity. When I realized there were thousands of other nearby women I could date, I didn't need to be so needy for any particular girl.
- Mentally, I continually associated 'jealousy' with 'immaturity' and 'neediness' and other concepts that have negative affect for me.
This lack of sexual jealousy came in handy when I later dated a polyamorous girl who was already dating two of my friends.
Rationality Lesson: Have a sense that more is possible. Know that you haven't yet reached the limits of self-modification. Try things. Let your map of what is possible be constrained by evidence, not by popular opinion.
Finale
There might have been a learning curve, but by golly, at the end of all that DIY science and rationality training and scholarship I'm much more romantically capable, I'm free to take up relationships when I want, I know fashion well enough to teach it at rationality camps, and I can build rapport with almost anyone. My hair looks good and I'm happy.
If you're a nerd-at-heart like me, I highly recommend becoming a nerd about romance, so long as you read the right nerd books and you know the nerd rule about being empirical. Rationality is for winning.
* My thanks to everyone who commented on earlier drafts of this post. Here are the biggest changes I made:
- Some said that while it's okay to be analytic about relationships, it would help the tone of the post if it was clear I was interacting with people as people, too. So I added more of that.
- Some thought I implied that everyone could or should be polyamorous, which is not something I intended or believe. I've made that clearer now.
- Robert Lumley provided some detailed comments that I updated in response to.
- I also made use of some suggestions made by HughRistik.
This is probably the single funniest bit in your backstory.
No.
It reads like a scene from The Big Bang Theory, and it is difficult to imagine that anyone would ever actually do that - till I remember doing similarly bad+stupid things.
Yeah, that was really, really bad. I'd like to take that one back, for sure.
.
No, it was in a car, and I had written it up in a 20-page document I printed off, but then I recited it from memory anyway. I'm kinda glad I don't have that document anymore.
This is the exact reverse, in every way, of Erin collaborating with a friend of hers to write up an elaborate argument tree for the job of persuading me that she ought to be my girlfriend, which she ended up not actually needing to use.
She also doesn't have that document any more. I so wanted to see it...
Wow! A 20 page essay on "why I'm breaking up with you"? That's just... brutal!
I'm picturing it with an impressive array of references at the end, and side remarks on The Neglected Virtue of Scholarsip.
And obviously the title should have been:
"In Which I Explain How Natural Selection Has Built Me To Be Attracted To Certain Features That You Lack"
:D
Out of curiosity, do you expect Luke-2015 to take responsibility for anything Luke-2011 does?
Only the good stuff! :)
Why? Did subsequent evo-psych research disprove the selection for those features?
People who get dumped want to know their partners' reasons for breaking up, not the biological etiology of those reasons. They are very likely to take lengthy discourses into the latter as insensitive, obfuscatory deflections (and probably correctly so).
I would call the 'real reasons' typically given to be obfuscatory deflections. People seldom know the actual reasons for why they want to break up. More often they are explicitly aware of one of the downstream effects of the actual reason.
Which is not to say that descriptions of the biological eitology are not also obfuscatory deflections. Most answers to this question will be! In fact, answers to this question will usually be obfuscatory deflections because not to do so will necessarily be 'insensitive'.
Another reason for not giving the real reasons is that sorting that kind of thing out is work and telling the truth about oneself is an offer of intimacy. If you're breaking up with someone, you may not want to do either one.
I'm sure that's the case. But my point was that if the real reason for the break-up was "I want to be with someone who possesses quality X that you lack," then tacking on "...because evolution made me that way" does not render the reason more real or add an additional, separate reason; it just renders the one reason better explained in a mostly irrelevant way.
It makes the reason much more of an attack-- it's not just "I find [feature] unattractive", it's "people in general are likely to find [feature] unattractive, and this is to the advantage of the human race".
Examining what Lukeprog wrote...
...his stated reason doesn't appear to match the paragraph that preceded it all (I realize that we are probably gettting a very condensed version of the conversation, but hopefully it didn't elide something this important).
Were I in the lady's position, I'd wonder why I only became physically unsuitable after I started seeking a legally recognized commitment. Unless the feature Lukeprog found unattractive was "wants committed pair-bonding," the explanation does not appear to fit the circumstances at all. This doesn't seem like a case of someone unable to deal with "radical honesty;" it seems like a case of someone being pissed off at what comes across as dishonesty.
The real harm, in my eyes, is because she will likely generalize that because evolution made you that way it made all men that way, which is likely not true. Actually it's patently untrue for any example I can think of.
Agreed that the ev-psych was bad. But...
If your true and actual reason for breaking up with someone is that her breasts are too small, consider that (a) saying "It was because you were too clingy" may cause them to try and mess with an aspect of their personality that doesn't even need fixing, and (b) total silence, which you may fondly imagine to be mercy, may result in her frantically imagining dozens of possible flaws all of which she tries desperately to correct, just on the off-chance it was that one. As opposed to, say, looking for a guy who's into smaller breasts next time.
Maybe I'm just being inordinately naive, but telling someone honestly, softly, and believably, your true reason for rejecting them, seems like it really should have certain advantages for them, if not for you. I mean, compared to either silence or lying. Calling it "grossly insensitive" is too quick a rejection of the possibility of telling a truth.
I think you're assuming too rational a partner.
If you're honest and say, "Your breasts are too small," the person in question might seek a guy who likes smaller breasts next time. Or she might fall into a deep self-loathing in which she believes that her body is imperfect and nobody could be attracted to her, thus sabotaging her own future potential relationships. Or she could run out and get breast implants, even though she doesn't really want them, in hopes that you / other future guys will find her more attractive--which is much more expensive and possibly less rewarding than simply finding people who like small breasts.
In my view it's better to keep it vague. Guessing over dozens of possible flaws is likely to be less harmful than obsessing over one particular flaw, since it's difficult to figure out / change whatever possible flaw you think may exist.
(Disclosure: I have been dumped once and did the dumping once. The dumper kept it vague; I kept it specific but lied. I can't judge how keeping it specific while lying worked, since the person in question was bipolar and therefore not at all a normal test subject. I can judge how keeping it vague went: I obsessed over dozens of flaws for a while, until I found other people who were interested, at which point I decided it was probably just a bad match and nothing really to do with absolute flaws at all. I do not know how a completely honest dumping pans out.)
Not really. Any evolutionary explanation of why I am repulsed by your physical appearance is going to spend a lot of time dwelling on your physical appearance. And I think the impersonalization bit is the key - it is a ridiculously impersonal digression at a moment of extreme emotional vulnerability on the other person's part. Most people will interpret impersonal explanations of this sort of emotionally impactful decision as an extremely cold-hearted way of excusing oneself. "I'm sorry I've just hurt your feelings. But allow me to explain how this is all just the work of the forces of sexual selection in our ancestral environment..."
I find it a bit amusing that for all the theorizing about why this was taken so badly, nobody seems to have mentioned the most obvious one. That is, while most people do want to know why you're breaking up with them, very few will appreciate somebody rambling on for 20 pages worth about all the things that are wrong with you. This would be true even if there had been no ev-psych content at all. ("Here are all the things about you that annoy me. First, you have small breasts. Second, you pick your nose. Third, you prefer Star Trek: Deep Space Nine above Star Trek: The Next Generation...)
No, because "Alice" was not operating by Crocker's Rules.
If only lukeprog had thought to tell Alice that at the time!
I'm pretty sure she would prefer I not elaborate.
Luke will never be able to break up with any future girlfriends because it would require too many preliminaries before he could even start the sequence which would explain why they should break up.
...says the only person who required more buildup to discuss metaethics than I did.
I have not tired of these jokes, but: actually, 'breaking up' rationalist-to-rationalist is pretty easy and painless in my (limited) experience.
I think that the picture detracts from the article. It's a deviation from most other LW pages, heteronormatizes the content, and in addition since the in-picture and out-of-picture background is white, the people look like cutouts in this really awkward way.
Yes. The image also makes the post look like some random "science finds: X!" journalism, and that's not a good thing.
Seems to reflect the content reasonably well actually, since it's a man reflecting on his experience with women...
As Kevin said,
As for the picture heteronormatizing the content... it's an explicitly hetero story, because it's my story. Don't you think it'd be weird to have a homosexual couple in the lead photo for my story?
People indeed like pictures- but stock photos on articles about romance and relationships pattern match to really awful websites.
Now I'm imagining a picture of Luke with a redacted silhouette of a woman entitled "woman I am not attracted to any more". There are arrows pointing to various lacking physical attributes lacking from an evolutionary psychology perspective, complete with sketches of what they should look like... Perhaps with a supplemental craziness vs hotness chart or two.
Luke, I’ve seen you and others mention the fashion stuff positively quite a few times, but I don’t think I’ve seen anything of substance about it.
Is it something that can only be imparted in a bootcamp, or can you convey parts of it in a blog post (not necessarily on LessWrong)? Since most readers won’t go to a bootcamp anytime soon, even if a text is less effective per person the aggregate benefits of such a post are likely higher. Or did I miss a link somewhere?
(I did encounter lots of fashion advice on the net, but I didn’t quite get it; I’m asking you about it because I vaguely remember seeing comments of (at least one) bootcamp participant who mentioned a similar problem but who did benefit from (what I assume were) your lessons.)
Instead of saying "Women want..." and "Women mean..." would it not be more accurate to say "Some women want.../mean..., and those are the kind of women I wanted to seek, so this knowledge was useful to me."? Also, did your studying convincingly impart that these general desires were gender specific, or would it be more accurate to say "Some people want.../mean"?
I am troubled by the vehemence by which people seem to reject the notion of using the language of the second-order simulacrum -- especially in communities that should be intimately aware of the concept that the map is not the territory.
Some forms of accuracy are simply wastes of space; how many digits of Pi does rational!Harry know, as compared to rational!Hermione?
The fact is that there are a lot people who do think "women/men want" when they hear someone saying "women/men want", and don't understand that these aren't just statistical trends. And I'm pretty sure that this ends up causing considerable damage. We should whatever we can to avoid strenghtening such views.
And while you may be right that the average commenter will recognize the difference even without it being explicitly stated, I wouldn't be so sure about the average reader. Note that lukeprog has stated that the article is also aimed towards people who don't usually read LW. A random person who gets the link to this article from his Facebook feed is a lot more likely to take such claims literally than someone who has read through every post on LW.
Also, I do feel like there are tendencies towards such over-generalization even among active LW commenters. For instance, there was one case of a commenter acting condescendingly towards people he thought were carrying out preferences that were suboptimal for their sex. (Or so my memory claims: when I went to look up the details, I noticed that the relevant comments had been deleted, so I can only link to my rebuttal.)
The conscious or subconscious decision to read "women/men want" as "women/men all want" rather than "women/men generally want" is a mental step, just as the conscious or subconscious decision to read "women/men want" as "women/men generally want" rather than "women/men all want" is a step.
It's not obviously the default to read "women/men want" as "women/men all want".
In this context, to do so is a) obviously wrong to me, b) actually wrong according to the intent of the author and c) would result in the author saying something stupid rather than arguably true.
A critical reading skill is to read charitably such that the author is not saying something stupid, and I have trouble sympathizing with what I see as an abandonment of that duty by readers or commenters excusing and/or justifying that.
If I say in passing "men are taller than women", I hope I don't get assailed by people pointing out that at maturity, many women are taller than many men, or that men start as babies less than a foot or so tall, at which point almost every female is taller than they are*.
*And when I say "almost every fe... (read more)
This was a good example, but I think you probably missed a part of the message. Or maybe I am imagining a part that did not exist.
Generally, people are speaking imprecisely. To state one's opinion with a mathematical precision as you did, is rare. (For example, writing this paragraph I would have a problem to precisely define what "generally" and "rare" mean in this context.) And when normally speaking, people tolerate this. ...uhm, usually.
Asking people to be precise is also a signal of something. We usually don't demand perfect clarity for every sentence we ever read or hear, even on LW. I suppose we usually demand it when we disagree with one's opinion.
Placing a burden of preciseness on some people or some opinions, provides their opponents cheap counter-attacks, when they don't have to discuss the argument, only point out the impreciseness.
Now, carefully crafting one's comments into precise sentences is possible, but has a non-zero cost. So by selectively asking people, whose opinion we don't like, to be more precise than usual, we make them pay for their dissent. All while pretending that we only care about the truth, without taking sides.
Of course, people ... (read more)
Understanding signaling in communication is almost as basic as understanding the difference between the map and the territory.
A choice of words always contains an element of signaling. Generalizing statements are not always made in order to describe the territory with a simpler map, they are also made in order to signal that the exceptions from the general case are not worth mentioning. This element of signaling is also present, even if the generalization is made out of a simple desire to not "waste space" - indeed the exceptional cases were not mentioned! Thus a sweeping generalization is evidence for the proposition that the speaker doesn't consider the exceptions to the stated general rule worth much (an upper bound is the trouble of mentioning them). And when dealing with matters of personal identity, not all explanations for the small worth of the set of exceptional people are as charitable as a supposedly small size of the set.
Good article, but after comparing it with the drafts, it comes across as a little... weakened?
I wonder why you ended up removing that line. Granted, I'd say "rarely" or "unlikely to be" rather than "never", but still, it looks like a useful pointer (or at least reminder), especially given the kind of crowd we have here.
If it's an observation based on repeated experiment, you should say it. If knowing this helped you optimise your strategies, you should say it. Or did you end up thinking that it's actually untrue?
Not adding those statements also has a cost.
Honestly, you don't know how many potential rationalists may find a post seemingly making unchallenged sweeping generalizations about women, and decide that these so-called rationalists are just a group of bigoted idiots that are less rational than your average person-in-the-street.
It's okay for someone to to say that pi is "3.14" if the other person knows that you know in reality it has more digits than that, and you're just being sufficient for your purposes. In short if there's actual transparency, not a double illusion of such.
But if they don't know that, if every post of yours may be perceived as an indication of complete positions (not hasty approximations thereof), it costs less to do things like say "most women" instead of "women" (or add a general disclaimer at the beginning) rather than not do it.
Here are the lessons illustrated by my story, which happens to be a heterosexual story because I'm heterosexual:
... (read more)Just say what you mean. Making a point obliquely in a way that requires readers to click a link is not very helpful.
What would you take as adequate evidence? The Klu Klux Klan is notorious for having lynched and committed other acts of racially motivated violence. There's no shortage of writers who have written about racially motivated violence against blacks as part of their personal experience. There's no shortage of documentation. What evidence, that we should reasonably be expect to be there if a significant ... (read more)
Before building a house, check that your foundation is sound.
The bias you have to be most careful of in this situation is availability. When claiming "liberals X, but conservatives don't X," I think people first run a mental search for "liberal X" and then a search for "conservative X." But mental searches aren't as reliable as you might wish - if in the post just above, your brain was primed with an example of "liberal X," your mental search will be a lot better at thinking of liberal X, and so you might conclude ... (read more)
Oh. Those are important examples and events in my own story; not surprisingly, they are heterosexually framed because I'm heterosexual. But four examples/events being heterosexually framed amidst the 7 labeled rationality lessons that are neutral to gender orientation does not make the post "only useful if you're a heterosexual male," I don't think.
So I'm still confused about what you seem to be reacting against. When I read a book and some small section of it doesn't apply to me, I don't write the author to complain that there was a section of w... (read more)
Freedom fries.
I read "Brave Truth-Tellers" as a slightly sarcastic way of saying "contrarians", which we've got plenty of.
I hate to get involved in political discussion, but that seems inconsistent with the data: dropout rates for men in the US are slightly higher than for women, but the difference is only about three percentage points. Perhaps more saliently, the gap appears to historically have been larger for black and Hispanic students than for whites (it still is for Hispanics), which is exactly the opposite of what I'd expect if "nonstop denigration of whites, males, white males, and dead white males" was a major factor.
The problem is that some insults (and this is currently true about those relating to homosexuality) get backed up with violence and/or with serious social exclusion-- they aren't "just words".
Also, people don't reliably put abuse behind them. Their reactions to threats that it might start up again are quite strong. The situation is complicated by the fact that these reactions can be amplified by social effects.
Racial Paranoia: The Unintended Consequences of Political Correctness has the thesis that, because overt racism isn't socially acceptable ... (read more)
Tremendously improved from your first draft, well done. Almost all of the misogyny vibes I got were removed/fixed.
The only real thing that bothered me was the italicization of "totally works". But we've bantered back and forth about this post enough. :-)
Downvoting both of you for signalling contempt at each other.
Let's try and keep the forum as respectful as we can.
"pro-life" instead of "anti-abortion"
"Enhanced interrogation" instead of "Torture"
"Collateral damage" instead of "Civilian casualties"
"Death tax" instead of "Inheritance tax" or "estate tax"
"Civilian contractors" instead of "Hired mercenaries"
"Freedom fries" instead of "French fries"
"Freedom fighters" instead of "Those particular terrorists we happen to support"
"illegal" used as a noun.
Do these suffice?
I have basically no desire to have an extended discussion on this matter with someone who seems to have had their mind killed by politics (whether or not I've had my mind killed as well). Of particular note is second clause of
which is historically ignorant to an almost absurd point-- a point I don't think I've seen anyone take before. I will note that random irrational violence is almost always done by victims of one kind or another. High status people don't get into fights as a rule.... (read more)
Hmm... I'd have guessed it was less about being a euphemism and more about English-speakers wanting to have a one-syllable word instead of a five-syllable one, much like "straight" is a one-syllable word for "heterosexual", without this meaning that hetero sex is "unmentionably disgusting".
Even from childhood we know that p... (read more)
And you wouldn't hear a peep out of me if it wasn't depressingly common to see people couch advice, theories and other mental-model-of-the-world stuff in such terms, giving no obvious sign that they've thought about the distinction between "speaking to a specific audience" and just speaking with the assumption that the listeners fit their relatively vague preconception of ... (read more)
I'm not convinced there's a significant correlation between being poly and being rational. In general, polyamory seems to be a mostly unchosen state of preference, and I've neither noticed nor would I particularly anticipate polyamorous people having a pronounced tendency to be more rational.
I'm curious as to why me in particular, but I'm happy to hear from you privately. In general, I go with radical transparency. I think that the truth is that so long as you don't show shame, guilt or malice you win. Summers screwed up by accepting that his thoughts were shameful and then asserting that they were forced by reason and that others were so forced as well. This is both low-status and aggressive, a bad combination and a classic nerdy failure mode.
Did you ever do a boot camp or infield training with pick up artists or receive any kind of in-person coaching or did you train by yourself?
Which of the seduction community books did you read if any at all? Which do you recommend, besides the ones you have listed in the article?
It is interesting to me that I feel almost horrified by nearly all of the relationship advice in this post. I think I am fairly rational, but by no means an expert and I am sure I have many areas of incompetency, but I haven't considered relationships to be one of them. I have had successful, reasonably happy experiences with dating even though I have also been through painful breakups. I have not had any desire to get married or to have children and this was a preference I became aware of around age 18 or 19. At the same time, though, I feel much happier ... (read more)
Why bother to quote my text if you're not going to answer the question?
You could say that there are cases where black people have attacked white people for being white, and I wouldn't contest it. And you could say that white people haven't attacked black people for being black, and I would be willing to concede that there is a sense in which that is true. But to say that black people have attacked white people for being white, but white people have not attacked black people for being black is simply absurd.
The reason that they can both be individually cor... (read more)
Oh no, not at all, I meant it more like "Oh LW, you so crazy!" I believe we are very, very contrarian here; stating unpopular beliefs is a form of showing off (see The Irrationality Game). I am not sure what quantifiable evidence I can offer of that, but I'm far from the first to make the observation.
It seems that you are going out of your way to spread general mind-killing to this thread.
Your second point, regarding differential admissions to colleges is potentially much more interesting. The claim that there's both directed harm and actual inefficiency resulting is a pretty strong type of argument. And you even back it up with sources.
But you start off your post with a claim that even if it were true is only marginally related to the topic at hand and is going to create a clear negative emotional reaction in almost any reader. And that claim is made... (read more)
The one I have in mind is Lee Edelman. He quotes Hegel a lot. He does philosophy from an English department and works in post-structuralism and, wait for it, psychoanalytic theory. Probably not Less Wrong's cup of tea. He does show gay porn in his lectures, though.
Anyway, he critiques what he calls "reproductive futurism", by which he means the norms and values that serve to continue civilization in the traditional sense: "The children are our future", the fact that political appeals on behalf of children are impossible to refuse, heter... (read more)
How does this follow? Why is it okay for lukeprog to post dating advice which are independent of gender-orientation-independent, but it's not okay to post advice which are dependent on gender-orientation? You may argue that the former interests more people, but that's just a difference in the number of people that may be interested, not a qualitative... (read more)
Are you requesting that he omit the genders of the participants in his life, including his romantic life?
If so, are you prepared to support with evidence an argument that hetero romance and the hetero dating scene is completely identical in all aspects to gay romance and the gay dating scene, and therefore knowing the genders and the sexual orientation of the participants isn't at all necessary to be communicated?
This post has definitely improved a lot.
I'm pretty neurotypical by Less Wrong standards and I don't see any tactless comments here.
I've never heard this before. Can you point me to some evidence?
The rest of your comment seems intentionally offensive. Am I correct in this assessment?
If so, feel free to pm me with your intended message without the offensive content, if you are trying to make a point with the offensive content. I don't know if anybody else is getting your intended message, but I know I am not, and I am curious, if you can reframe your content more constructively.
Envy is an attitude/emotion.
Whether or not someone feels envy is a fact.
Pain is a feeling.
Whether or not someone feels pain is a fact.
They exist, but they're mostly all tangled up in whatever hybrid of Marxism and/or postmodernism is in vogue. Add in a sprinkling of half-understood genetics, evolution, and evolutionary psychology, and it's just a monstrous headache every paragraph.
Between cooks and gardeners and housekeepers and nannies and laundry services and grocery delivery and personal assistants, I am really failing to think of any housework that could not be contracted out. In which case, when members of the household do it themselves they are saving themselves precisely the cost of contracting it out. My laundering my shirts is being compensated at .99 cents/lb minus the cost of running the laundry machines. My cooking dinner is being compensated at the price of a meal out minus the cost of a meal in.
Wait, wait, I think I see something here. I think I see why we are incapable of agreeing.
This seems more like a description of how S-O S's fail.
Can you offer any reason why I should treat S-O S's as a useful or realistic representational scheme if my... (read more)
Compare these considerations: (1) I believe it's better to not have posts like this, (2) it's just better to change posts like this in a way that makes them more widely useful. Of these, (2) can't bring about an improvement by a large margin, since heterosexual males form a sizeable portion of the readership, possibly more than half (given the gender imbalance), so its relevance seems more likely to come from either urge to rationalize (1) without admitting it as an actual reason (perhaps subconsciously), or from expecting people who don't benefit from the post to dislike its presence, which is again a special case of (1).
Of all the forms of communication over which to trivialize evolutionary psychology you chose insults? Knowing how, when and who to insult is one of the most critical instincts evolutionary psychology provided us!
+1 for last comment making me imagine lukeprog as Charlie Sheen.
What dangers are you referring to, specifically? Can you point me to a specific source that measures these harms? I have never heard your concluding suggestion before, though I think I have heard the opposite claim.
There's no more need for a poster boy for racial violence against blacks than there is for a poster boy for historical repression of the Native Americans. Why should anyone have to come up with a single representative example when you can point to general policy?
Well into the 20th century, the Klu Klux Klan was still considered socially respectable as an institution, and being a member could even be poli... (read more)
Homicide Bomber.
There are certainly other examples, but that's the first one to come to mind.
You know, you're going to have to back up these claims eventually. Why not start now?
It is not uncompensated financially, if the alternative is hiring someone to do the same work. It may or may not be under-compensated, depending on her other options.
Marginalizing or diminishing people due to the socially enforced classes they belong to is not at all the same thing as "showing subtle signs of thinking thoughts you disagree with".
Feeling demeaned or socially excluded is a fundamentally different kind of pain than that caused by having one's toe stepped on: it is a much more damaging one.
Downvoted for telling me what I'm arguing for and against, for something like the third time now, when I am fairly certain that our intuitive ideas of how abstraction works are somewhat different. This is one of the few things that breaks my internal set of "rules for a fair argument."t.
(Note: I am NOT downvoting for the paragraph beginning "OF COURSE they do", because it's given me a hunch as to what is going on here, is clearly written, and makes your actual objections to the candy bowl case clearer.
I SHOULD not be downvoting for the ... (read more)
o.O
If you're going to change the subject, at least don't try to act like I'm doing something wrong when I politely go along with the subject change, okay?
Most text-based, internet-based communication has very little in the way of time pressure, and LessWrong specifically has a norm of allowing or even encouraging comments on older posts and comme... (read more)
I realize you're getting rather piled on in this thread, so I'm somewhat reluctant to nitpick like this, but:
expresses an idea that is distinct from
It's not all about you, basically.
I'm going to have to let my response to this stew for a bit before it's suitable to post, if I can get the inferential distances reasonable at all.
The short, probably-won't-work, only-posting-it-so-the-above-doesn't-sound-like-an-evasion version is that your assumption that people will automatically parse things like that assumes that such people are at stage 4 (possibly 5) or better of Perry's development theory (or equivalent), and that such an assumption is not safe to make, even here.
There's some recommended reading if you click here and scroll down to where it says "recommended reading".
My rationality thoughts on certain aspects of relationships:
• Your first time (hug, kiss, etc...) with a new partner
Be aware that you have built some expectations. Thus if your expectations were high(low) you are likely to be disappointed(overexcited). Then your second time will be perceived as better(worse) due to the regression towards the mean phenomena. So draw a representative sample before judging and start optimizing.
When I walk down the street and hear footsteps I start thinking about robbery. Then I look around and see someone white and feel relieved.
Because no conservatives have ever started language projects?
I almost admire your fortitude in repeatedly charging forward, Light Brigade-like, with material you know beforehand is going to be downvoted to oblivion for partisan mindkilling.
At this point you are coming across as either a troll or as hopelessly mind-killed. It is possible you do not fall into those categories, but that's the impression one gets from comments like the above. Please read if you have not already done so why politics is the mindkiller.
May 2011 : Greece: Fascists attempt to kill immigrants : one migrant stabbed to death, 17 hospitalized.
I am surprised that this is so severely downvoted.
The second and third paragraphs are excellent, with sources, and I have very different standards for voting depending on the speaker and what I expect from him or her. Do others not? I would encourage sam0345 to make more posts like this until they are standard for him, and then later dowvote him for such posts when posts like this are typical for him.
Upvoted.
Downvoted for selecting one out of hundreds of potential effects and calling it "apparent" without a shred of evidence. Seriously, you can't make that point without a book-length argument, and good luck getting anyone to read a book like that.
"Wrongthink" is oldspeak. Say 'ungoodthink'.
Also, I'm curious whether you think your assertion holds in cases where an activist organization of (Group X) is the entity that accuses a speaker of political incorrectness towards Group X.
I think this might be confusing pedanterrific because if I read you right above you don't agree with him. I tho... (read more)
To say that a situation is not wholly caused by enumerated factors is generally trivially true, so the question becomes how much connotation is intended, which means the question should probably be rephrased.
I don't think it's a good idea to ask if states of the world are justified when people disagree about the causes of those states of the world unless great care is taken to not be confusing. Those things can be addressed separately by just talking... (read more)
Not sure if serious. Just in case you are, however: 'them' is referring to the people doing financially unrecompensed work in the home. 'it' is the financially unrecompensed work in the home. 'Who' and 'Whose' are up to you to define - that's why they're phrased as questions, dontcha know.
I was never addressing the entirety of your argument - on which I have to reserve judgment, having not thought it through entirely.
As it happens, my wife and I both work. We both receive income in tokens that can be exchanged in any market. However, I think this is a meaningless distinction; per the laws of the state of California, money I make isn't "mine" and money she makes "hers" - money either of us make is "ours". As either of us works, we have more tokens. As either of us does tasks that save us money, we have more ... (read more)
My only point is that it is not unpaid.
Circumstance 1) I go to my programming job, write programs for other people, and in the end my household has more money than otherwise.
Circumstance 2) Someone goes to a housekeeping job, cleans up after other people, and in the end their household has more money than otherwise.
Circumstance 3) Someone cleans their own household, part of which involves cleaning up after other people, in place of hiring a housekeeper, and in the end their household has more money than otherwise.
Please clarify why circumstance 2 is "... (read more)
Ok: let's suppose he intended the primary definition of innocuous, "not harmful." If a choice is made voluntarily, then by the assumption of revealed preferences it is the least 'harmful.' If we forced women to choose with the same distribution that men do, then on net women would be worse off- i.e. harmed by our force.
It seems incontestable to me that distributions of values are different for men and women. If values are different, choices will be different, and that is optimal.
Sure, if your pool of potential partners is randomly sampled from the entire population. In practice, nobody's pool of potential partners is selected thusly; you seek out pools, as it were, and so you can seek out polygamous groups so that your pool of potential partners contains many polygamists (and monogamish-ists?).
What exactly is the problem with the cited portion? Methinks you are reading things into Luke's comments that are not really there. This is sadly common when dealing with 'touchy' issues (sexuality, race, gender, etc.). Sometimes a person reveals their overly sensitive nature about things rather than true points in such instances.
Also, before one insists upon edits one ought to justify why such things are necessary. If you a really intent on upping a person's rationality you need to provide an argument that justifies your suggestion.
I will try to clarify points when I see them missed. This should not be interpreted as me siding with you in the debate, necessarily.
This was not one of my favorite posts on the site, but I did find it interesting - and, more particularly, I think there is space nearby for more interesting things. I think where I most strongly disagree with you is your classification (mentioned a few places) of this as dating advice at all. I see it as more of a case study in the exercise of rationality.
That rationality itself doesn't care about sexuality, therefor, cut... (read more)
The cost of omitting them isn't clear initially, either.
I was generally taught to carry significant figures further than strictly... (read more)
Reluctantly, I agree with you that seven women is fairly small set. Maybe my searches weren't properly done or my standards were too high, but these were the only women I found attractive in my searching.
To my credit, I definitely did try to put something my message that stood out, especially something related to her profile. I think one of the errors in my messages was that I came off too strong.
Congratulations! I'm glad that the service is working for you. Gives me a bit of hope (=
Maybe. But I didn't make any claims about exactly how common this attitude is among LW'ers, only that it seems to exist.
I find that edit sort of chilling!
Based on the above considerations it's still probably better to claim unnatural attraction to large breasts then saying something is wrong with her. It's easier on the girl, plus possibly better to have reputation of a perv than a shmuck. Not sure what the score is now.
Evidence?
One series of anecdotes: I've been the only white person in the subway car quite a few times. I didn't check carefully, but there were few if any Asians. I'm short, I'm female, I have no reason to think I'm a scary looking person. I haven't been attacked or threatened.
And Protestants! Can't forget those poor, persecuted Protestants, nosiree.
Seriously, where did you go to school? Cause it wasn't where I went to school, I'll tell you that.
It depends somewhat on whether we are speaking descriptively or prescriptively, in terms of how people think about it.
Do I think that most people consider these to be the same, and that you are some odd outlier for interpreting it differently? No.
I just think this perspective is l... (read more)
This was my understanding of the comment here, and was what I initially objected to.
No one is saying he is. In fact, the context of this entire thread is someone saying explicitly that no one is saying he is.
Jandila:
When people say "that shit is gay" gay people feel marginalized and diminished. They feel hurt. Whether or not it was intentional (and certainly it often is).
Is that a ponycode?
Or he could be advertently revealing that fact.
Yes, of course. That's trivially true and not in dispute.
I still think you're rather missing the point, however. I don't see how it makes sense to object to the phrase 'mostly attributable' when that's a premise of the hypothetical. Let's look at the original comment in context:
... (read more)Why was this downvoted?
I find this a fascinating assertion. What other harms do you imagine might be unevaluatable?
You think my choice to cook a meal for myself and my wife, rather than (say) ordering a pizza, is not innocuous?
I downvoted it for the following claim:
"many of the posters here, who don't have some hands-on experience with being in a social minority and are not apt to readily grasp the difference between "I am angry/hurt by this AND think it is incorrect" and "my disagreement is purely emotional")."
I think it is unfair to say they do not understand when they may simply believe that motivated cognition is occurring or similar.
Yeah, I'm familiar with Rationalist Taboo, and I was looking for a substitute for "politically incorrect" fitting the description provided. "Taboo", in its sense of "culturally forbidden" rather than its sense of "party game about avoiding words", is what I came up with. Sorry if that lacked clarity.
There are several reasons to play Rationalist Taboo, though; I'd assumed that the grandparent wanted to drop the phrase mainly because of its political loading (which seems to be causing some problems here), not because of any implicit assumptions or ambiguity of definition that needs to get aired out. In which case brevity would be no sin.
My apologies.
My suggestion of random factors means that there's no detailed explanation possible, except for history which is almost certainly based in spoken words and emotional reactions and therefore not available.
I believe that it's the tone which makes an insult. Insult is about lowering status, and is basically a group effect-- a good insult implies not just likelihood of ongoing attack from that person, but that the attacks will deservedly continue from other people.
It seems to me that cultures are probably constrained to ranges by various issues (number of peop... (read more)
I'm more dubious about ev psych than most here, I think. It wouldn't surprise me if there is random history affecting which insults are salient in various societies, rather than some sort of optimization.
The fact that people can insult each other so easily may well have some evolutionary history.
Any theories about why people are so apt to remember insults for years?
How are you defining poly then? Can you be more explicit?
And yet, we still say that p(Christianity is correct) is epsilon, rather than zero - and this seems to cause few-to-no problems, even.
Yes I do, though there is lots of misinformation and bullshit out there so nowadays you have a hard time distilling the useful stuff. Also a lot of it is very hard to understand if you don't see it applied in field by a pro.
I agree that day game is great although night game can be very good for practice because people are often more in a social mood than during day.
I'm counting individual messages, not individual people; I've definitely contacted fewer than 466 people, but without going through the whole list I can definitely say it's been over a hundred individuals. I prefer to talk in real time rather than correspondence, so if I get along well with someone initially, I'll progress to instant messaging and/or meeting in person.
I joined the site about four years ago, but I've only been active on and off, and disabled my account for about a year.
I just meant someone might find it funny to downvote a comment talking about how many downvotes they've seen- I wasn't talking about you in particular.
Link at top of page.
LOL
(Just couldn't resist posting my reaction, even though there's already an essentially identical comment.)
It seems that this was made a lot more amusing by you apparently having great social skills these days.
(And makes me all the more glad I've never broken up with anyone, even though this requirement made it kinda hard to get into a relationship in the first place.)
[comment deleted]
I will read it and get back to you.
Mystery is the PUA. His book "The Mystery Method" is a classic and while some canned routines are dated, the overall theoretical foundation is solid. Perhaps he could have optimised presentation a bit to more easily facilitate inner game and perhaps Bang by Roosh does a better job of presenting game to the average Joe layman by ditching the geeky acronyms and pseudo-evopsych(I love the geeky acronyms and pseudo-evopsych) but overall if you want to understand how dating and seduction works I have yet to see a better book.
I haven't read his newer work (Revelation ect.) but I'd put a high probability on it being quality stuff.
Hm. This got downvoted pretty heavily, didn't it. So how about some of the downvoters point out some examples of conservative projects to deliberately remodel language, in the sense for instance feminism explicitely tries to, or that whole business of political correctness.
Disclaimer: I'm not conservative, hell I'm not even American and we don't have "conservatives" where I live. I'm asking this because the falseness of what sam said is very far from apparent to me.
Great :)
I'll be responding to the above in several chunks, as it's gotten large enough to be a bit unwieldy.
That's still insufficient context: to be able to give a definite answer, I'd need something like the paragraph the sentence was contained in.
... (read more)No, it's not.
(...)
The problem is that without the connotations associated with the word, Susan's statement doesn't even constitute a counter argument.